she had tidied away her and Moshe's secrets. It was like putting things away inside a secret drawer, where inquisitive people could not find them. Struggling to stuff his uniform shirt into his short pants, he was clumsier. She helped him as the bell rang, dusting him down with quick pats of her hands, removing imaginary fluff.
They dawdled behind the crowds pressing toward the schoolhouse doorway, a headlong rush that braked at the steps and slowed to a massed shuffling punctuated by quick, urgent whispers, shovings, angry hisses, and finally silence as the man-teacher appeared in the doorway to inspect the perfect lines and the hush into which the rowdy mass had resolved itself at the door.
He stood erect and tall—to the littler children, a colossus—a great high-brown man with a bullet head, flexing, with slow, deliberate movements, the cane that was the same color as himself, while his eyes, the color of fresh molasses at the bottom of a gourdie, surveyed the pack with a libidinous gleam, waiting to catch just one out of line. He caught two, shirt out of pants or imperfectly tucked, and the cane descended with gusto, raising a vague dust from the flour-bag drawers the boys wore beneath their short khaki pants.
One boy leaped from side to side, sticking his bottom out to deflect the force of the blows. He got a double portion for his pains.
The other boy, more savvy, merely roared for mercy, standing still except for the staccato jerking of his body each time the lash descended. "Mi mumma, mi mumma! Woie, Teacha, Man-Teacha, mi nah go dweet again. Mek mi put in mi shirt inna mi pants, Teacha, duu, Teacha, duu!"
Man-Teacher gave him a few more as well, for creating shame and disgrace on his school. "Boy! Anybody killing goat around here? You is goat? Anybody cutting your throat? This is a school, not a abattoir! Stop your cow-bawling!"
But the other, who was guilty of the greater crime of evading punishment, got a greater portion of licks.
A few girls giggled, amused by the triple entertainment: the boy leaping and calling "Sight!" while he stuck his bottom out so that he was contorted almost in the shape of a saddle; the other calling down God from the cross and bawling for his mother to convince the man-teacher that he was dropping dead from the licks. Above all, they were amused by the way the licks exposed the boys' poverty. With every fall of the cane, flour dust rose in the air. Only the very poor, which none would admit was most of them, wore flour-bag drawers, and who wore them was a secret poorly kept—exposed by the man-teacher's zealous cane, for no matter how well the mothers washed, some stubborn residue of flour remained, and flaked up in an aerial smoke when the cloth was beaten.
No one confessed to the crime of giggling, so the head teacher distributed a rain of licks on the heads, shoulders, and breasts of the girls standing in the general vicinity of the giggles. After this, Man-Teacher sweating in streams, the children were allowed to chant in unison, "Thank you, God, for work and play, and all the good things you give us every day," before proceeding inside in an orderly manner, dispersing into their various classrooms, which were separated from each other not by doors but by folding blackboards, so that the activities of all the classes, which included many chants of lessons learned by rote, resonated, with astonishingly musical cadence, throughout all the other classes and the doorways of the school.
Holding fast to Moshe's hand as they crouched without crouching at the back of the line (Man-Teacher beat for poor posture), Arrienne could feel him trembling beside her. She squeezed his hand in their secret signal, and as his fingers squeezed hers in return, the great wings unfurled and pushed them forward and they plunged, invisible, into the darkness of their classroom where, with instinct and without sight, they found their bench (three children to a bench fastened to one desk) and slid onto it without speaking to the third child, who was already sitting there. The wings that made them invisible also robbed them of sight for the small moment that the miraculous protection lasted.
Man-Teacher, counting the children streaming inside to make sure all were present, missed two, but his eyes were blinded from the sun and he thought he'd miscounted. Something brushed past his ear with a feeling of bats, as it often did, and it annoyed him, because he knew there would be a buzzing in his ears for the whole of the next week.
Chapter III
i
Rachel took her son to the big school when he was six years old. Until then, he had hardly appeared to the eyes of the world. She could have sent him to basic school, kindergarten, which was an option, when he was three or even two years old, but she did not. Quite a few children went; his friend Arrienne had gone; it was there she learned to read, and write her ABCs. In those days basic school was not compulsory the way the big school, elementary, was, and Rachel was not the only parent who chose not to send her child. Most preferred to save limited resources for when the children were old enough for the big school. (Almost every child was taught his or her ABCs and all were taught to spell their names at home, even by parents who could not read. Fear of disgrace was the fear of being unable to recognize one's own name on a bulla cake before swallowing it whole.)
Rachel was not among those who chose not to send their child early to school. She simply had a different vision from everybody else. Though the big school did not admit children until they reached the age of seven, she had gone and begged the head man-teacher to take Moshe the year before, and the year before that, until, a year before the officially required age, the co–head teacher, who was the head man-teacher's wife, saw that the child could read far above his years and could write his ABCs, so she relented. Rachel had taught him during the years at home, using the Reader's Digests she got in the post and the Nola books she bought at the drugstore in Ora. And Moshe was a natural. He took to books like ducks to river water.
Rachel avoided the basic school for fear her son would be killed before he was old enough to defend himself. It was not that she feared the children at the big school less, but that she knew the children at that school feared the man-teacher and his wife more. The two, without any sense of irony, were known to beat without mercy for fighting and bullying in any shape or form. Moshe was delicate as stringing roses in April, and his transparent skin bruised at a touch, so that but for her obsessive care, he would have been a mass of scabs and wounds.
As it was, he was often bruised and wounded, since there were things from which she could not shield him—falling down when he ran; cutting his knees when he kneeled on the ground to watch snails or sow seedlings on his side of the kitchen garden; dreaming (this she did not know) of terrible flight and kidnapping by mattress when she and Noah fought in the front room (after such dreams he woke up black and blue); burning and peeling when he forgot to wear his sun hat (the wounds wept for days when the sun cut him like this, and she had to wrap him in white cloths loaded with cucumber and slices of aloe vera, and keep him confined to the back room, where he slept, in the dark).
For the first five years of his life he did not know any other children. His world was circumscribed by his mother's life, and his mother's friends, which were two. Rachel was a woman who kept to herself and seldom left her yard or the one-acre farm adjoining her yard. This was where she planted most of the provisions the family needed for their meals. She accompanied her husband to the hospital to tend the sore that never healed, and it was in the same place, Ora-on-Sea, that she shopped for necessities she could not plant—brown soap, mixed meal, kerosene oil, replacement lamp wicks, salt beef or salted cod—though she could as easily have shopped at Miss Caro's or Miss Lill's establishments in the district. But she shopped in Ora-on-Sea because she was a woman who liked to keep to herself and didn't like people knowing her business.
Miss Caro and Miss Lill sold groceries in extremely flexible amounts and combinations depending on what people could afford; the two shopkeepers also gave credit (trus), writing up what people owed on wrinkled strips of brown paper that they stuck on a wire spike attached to the wall behind the till. Giving trus was an act of kindness much valued by villagers who received their wages once
